I've known a fair number of people who were really into Tibet and the Dalai Lama.
I have never been one of them.
I have the basic idea of his permanent exile in India and how lots of people want to free Tibet from Chinese rule. That'd be cool. I'm all for it. But do I have a huge amount invested in it one way or another? No.
I don't know if 1997's Kundun, the final Scorsese film I had not yet seen, resonates more for the people who are invested in Tibet than it does for me, but it didn't resonate for me very much at all.
A number of problems here:
1) The acting. The two primary actors chosen to depict the man born Tenzin Gyatso -- identified in his infancy as the 14th Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader -- are, like, not good. This is not their fault any more than it was Jake Lloyd's fault he wasn't good as Annakin Skywalker. Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong and Gyurme Tethong are as good as they had any reasonable expectation to be, but unfortunately, the reasonable expectations were pretty low. They just can't carry the weight of the drama.
2) The drama. But that's also the problem: the weight of the drama is diffuse and unspecific. Scorsese and screenwriter Melissa Mathison are not able to create many moments in this film that feel any more significant than any other moments. Kundun tries to build a thematic structure that goes beyond just retelling moments from the first quarter century of the Dalai Lama's life -- the still-living Dalai Lama was born in 1935 and escaped to India in 1959, which is when the film ends -- but either that structure doesn't register, or the significant events of his life, beyond his actual escape, just aren't very cinematic. Then again, neither is his escape as depicted here.
3) The score. When unable to produce narrative peaks unto themselves, Scorsese compensates by draping Philip Glass' oppressively earnest score over the whole thing. We rarely get a respite from the score, which I'm sure is not bad musically, but is used so consistently that it wears out its appeal in really short order. And when the music is telling you in every single moment of the film just how important this all is, none of it feels important.
I could go into a lot more specifics of why Kundun didn't work for me, but it's the end of the year and I have a lot more pressing things to spend my time on. Plus, I suspect I don't need to convince you that the film is mediocre. It has the reputation of being one of Scorsese's least remembered films, which seems like an especial failure considering how prestigious the subject matter is and how much it clearly means to so many people.
But hey, at least the thing wasn't chockablock with Catholic iconography.
I will finish with one final thought on why the film didn't register with me. I said earlier that I know a number of people who are/were really into Tibet and the Dalai Lama. Well, I actually know at least one person who has met him, a guy I grew up with and have known since we were maybe six years old.
I'm not actually sure what he's doing now, but the early stages of his career involved both Tibet and work in the music/entertainment industry that brought him into the orbit of guys like the Beastie Boys and Spike Jonze, who were both big into Buddhism and Tibet. Now that I'm googling it, I think my friend (we would have been friendly once, though it was more a proximity friendship than an actual one) must have been involved in the production of the documentary Free Tibet, about the 1996 Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco, on which Jonze worked as a cinematographer while the Beasties organized and headlined the concert. The timeline would have been exactly right for that.
In any case, rumor among mutual friends was that this guy met the Dalai Lama, but what's more, the Dalai Lama was charmed by the goatee he wore at the time and gave it a little tug while chuckling playfully. It's a great story to say you had your goatee tugged by the Dalai Lama.
But that's not the Dalai Lama I saw here. This Dalai Lama was bland and humorless and given to awkward pauses that lasted a lot longer than they should have. (Where's Thelma Schoonmaker stepping in to tighten things up?) I was hoping Kundun would showcase a Dalai Lama with the lightness and sense of humor demonstrated in the goatee-tugging incident, the traits I now identify with the man, both from this story and from other footage I see of him. Scorsese couldn't figure out how to get even one moment like that, nor am I certain that his actors would have been able to deliver it.
One final, really final, thought: I had always thought the movie was pronounced "KOON-DOON," but from hearing characters in the movie say it, it seems it's more like "KUN-dun." For some reason this qualifies as one final disappointment.
Well I must say the Settling the Scorsese series was itself a disappointment. I didn't really care for any of the first three films I saw, Who's That Knocking at My Door, followed by New York, New York and The Color of Money. Things did perk up with New York Stories, especially Scorsese's segment, but that was only a short film's worth of work from him. The Age of Innocence was a standout, finally, but Kundun just brought things back to earth with a thud. Oh well. I guess I'd just been wise with my previous selections from the filmography of a man who remains, without a doubt, one of the all-time greats.
My disappointment with my unseen Scorsese does not translate to a disappointment with this sort of bi-monthly format for finishing off the filmography of a great director. And I already have my subject -- or possibly subjects? -- picked out for 2023. I'll let you know about that sometime in January.
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